Find Your Destination by Making Wrong Turns

Game development is a notoriously iterative process. Your final game will bear little resemblance to your first draft. The best way to make a good game is to play-test it to death, hammering out all the inconsistencies and problems. This is incredibly time-consuming and disheartening. Don’t let it bother you.

My first game, War Co., went through 17 iterations before its final version was ready for manufacturing. I think I got off easy.

7 of 17 versions of War Co. The earliest versions barely resemble the game today.

Feedback and play-testing is critical. Yet even good play-testers can usually only “point and grunt” at the true underlying problems in your game. Before you play-test your game with other people, make sure you know what type of game you’re trying to create. Come up with the basic feeling you want your game to evoke, an overall objective, and basic constraints that make it hard for players to achieve that objective. All mechanics and art must serve this basic feeling.

Accept that you’re using blunt instruments for a finesse operation. Accept that using limited mechanics can cause unforeseen consequences in gameplay. Accept that people will horribly break your game. Accept that your rules are borderline unreadable. Keep going. These kinks will work themselves out with time, feedback, an open mind ready to receive and process that feedback, and hard work.

Play-testing feedback is sometimes like using this for brain surgery.

Take risks. Try things you don’t think will work. Try things that go against traditional wisdom. One of the most praised mechanics of War Co. is that the number of cards you have left is effectively your life. You win by causing your opponent to run out of cards faster than you, often at random. This thwarts the idea of relying on specific combos to win like you might do in games like Magic: the Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh! because it forces players to abandon the assumption that a certain needed card will eventually turn up. By all means, this shouldn’t have worked. I didn’t expect it to. Even still, I gave it a try and ironed out the details over 7 more versions of the game until it “felt right”.

Trust that you will arrive at your destination. There may be delays. There may be unexpected layovers and missed connecting flights. You may have to circle the airport a few times.

Your destination won’t look like what you first imagined, but it will be better. Strap in and enjoy the journey. It’ll make you a better person. It’ll make your game a better game.

Join my community of over 1,100 game developers, artists, and passionate creators.